When Rene P. is asked who he is, he does not begin with prison, methamphetamine, arrests, or the fifteen years addiction took from his life.
He begins with kindness.
“I think I’m a kind guy. I’m kind.”
It is an important distinction. Rene does not deny the things he has done, but he no longer believes the worst things he has done are the sum total of who he is. He describes himself as family-oriented, someone who tries to find joy even in difficult circumstances. He is a father, a son, a friend and, perhaps most importantly to him, a believer.
“I have a big faith in God. I would like to think that I’m a man of God.”
Rene is also clear that being a man of God does not mean being a perfect one. “Every day I try to better myself… to become more of a man of faith every day.”
That faith did not suddenly appear when Rene got sober. God was there long before the drugs, the prison cells, and the paranoia.
Rene grew up in Covina in a loving home. His mother came from El Salvador while pregnant with him because she wanted her son to have opportunities she feared he might not have there. She was protective—sometimes intensely so—and Rene’s childhood revolved largely around home, family, and church.
“My mom wanted a better life for me.”
As he grew older, however, the world his mother had tried so hard to protect him from became the world that fascinated him most. By twelve, Rene was “tagging” (graffiti) and gravitating toward kids who seemed tougher and more streetwise. He wanted what most twelve-year-olds want, although he went looking for it in dangerous places: belonging.
He began getting into fights and trying to prove himself. “I would go get beat up by these bigger kids just because I wanted to…prove myself to these guys.”
Drugs entered his life around the same time. Cigarettes turned into marijuana. Alcohol followed. By his freshman year, he was regularly taking ecstasy. At fifteen came cocaine and then methamphetamine.
Unlike many addiction stories, Rene cannot point to one traumatic event that made him start using. “I think I just used drugs because somebody said, ‘Hey, do you want to try this?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’” He was curious. Then curiosity became addiction.
“I couldn’t stop doing meth once I was introduced to it.”
For years, Rene existed between two worlds. There was the person raised in church by parents who loved him, and there was the person becoming increasingly consumed by drugs and the streets.
At seventeen, he left home. Meth became a constant presence as he and the people around him stole from cars and became involved in fraud. Yet even then, Rene had not completely abandoned his relationship with God. “I’d pray to God to protect me.” Looking back, he understands the contradiction.
“I definitely feel like at that time I had turned my back on God. I was living in my own will and not God’s will.” And eventually that life caught up with him.
Just when Rene turned eighteen, after burglarizing a home with a friend, he was arrested. He was sentenced to four years and served two, spending time in Pelican Bay Prison.
Prison changed his understanding of the life he had been chasing. “I went to jail thinking that I was the shit. And in jail, I realized that I was…a little peanut. I ain’t shit.”
For someone who had spent adolescence trying to prove himself, prison stripped away the illusion that toughness could protect him from consequences. There were moments inside when Rene believes today that God was protecting him even when he was far from living according to his faith.
Once, someone handed him a sharpened piece of metal (a “shank”). It was his turn to participate in prison violence.
“I remember I became pale and I didn’t know what to do.”
Before anything happened, another inmate realized the weapon should never have been handed to Rene and took it away. Thankfully, nothing happened. Although Rene still remembers moments like that, he sees them differently now.
He survived situations that could easily have changed his life forever. And somewhere beneath all of it, God remained.
After prison, Rene tried to rebuild. He returned home, earned his high school diploma, and enrolled in college.
Then, tragically, his father died from liver cancer.
His father’s death left Rene grieving while simultaneously forcing him into a new role. His mother spoke limited English and suddenly needed help navigating finances, paperwork, and the responsibilities her husband had previously handled.
Rene became the man of the house while still trying to figure out how to become the man he wanted to be.
A therapist would later describe much of Rene’s life as one prolonged state of fight-or-flight: a sheltered childhood followed by drugs, streets, prison, freedom, loss, and responsibility.
Shortly, meth returned.
Years later, while the mother of his children was pregnant with their first child, he burglarized a house and stole a car. This led to another arrest that left Rene facing the possibility of life in prison.
He still remembers the judge’s words.
“Young man, you must now get your things in order. You are fighting a third and fourth strike, life imprisonment.”
His bail was set at $1.4 million. His mother and the mother of his child began crying in the courtroom. Rene removed the jewelry his father had left him and handed it to his mother. He followed the bailiff, as he mouthed the words to his family: “It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.”
Eventually, the most serious allegations were dropped. A later felony-evasion case went to trial and ended in an 11-to-1 hung jury, allowing Rene to avoid what could have become another lengthy prison sentence.
While incarcerated, he had prayed, “God, I promise I’ll do drugs no more. Just help me defeat this.”
He got another chance. But addiction followed him out. Within weeks, Rene was using meth again. It is something he talks about now without excuses. Faith did not magically erase addiction, and loving his family did not automatically give him the ability to stop.
Fatherhood made that reality even more painful.
“All I ever wanted to do was be a good dad. Because my dad was good to me, and I just wanted at least to reciprocate that to my kids.”
His greatest obstacle was always the same.
“The dilemma has always been drugs.”
“When I’m on drugs, I’m not able to be there. Or if I am there, I’m not present.”
For years, Rene lived in a vicious cycle. He would accumulate months of clean time, relapse for a weekend, lose a job, find another one, and start rebuilding. Then it would happen again.
When his second child was born by emergency C-section, Rene arrived at the hospital high and paranoid. But the moment his baby was placed in his arms, something broke through the drugs.
“I held my baby, and I felt hope.”
From that moment, everything became clear.
“This is the reason why I’m gonna stop doing drugs.”
But addiction does not disappear simply because someone finally has something worth living for. Eventually, the mother of Rene’s children could no longer live inside the instability. She left. Rene felt as though he had lost his purpose. “What’s the point? What’s the point of working? What’s the point of anything?”
His addiction became more severe. He began injecting methamphetamine.
“I just wanted to not feel.”
Eventually, he wanted something beyond numbness. He wanted to stay in psychosis because remembering the life he had lost hurt too much.
The man who naturally loves people slowly became completely isolated from them.
Paranoia made friendship difficult. Shame kept him away from people who cared about him. Meth reduced his world until much of his life existed inside a bedroom at his mother’s house.
“I was completely alone.” For the first time during the interview, Rene’s eyes welled with tears.
There was something striking about that moment.
He has already spoken about prison. He has described facing life behind bars, losing his father, criminal cases, and years of addiction. But when Rene talks about being alone, his composure changes. Because underneath everything else, addiction had taken away one of the things most fundamental to who Rene is: his connection to other people.
His mother remained by his side, despite everything he had put her through. She loved him even as his addiction progressed, even when loving him became painful. Toward the end, Rene began stealing from her to pay for drugs. He does not minimize it. He does not defend it.
Instead, he reaches for a Spanish word that describes something English cannot quite capture for him.
“Sinvergüenza”
The word comes from sin vergüenza—“without shame.”
“I didn’t have any more shame in my game. I’m just stealing from my mom, getting high in her house… having her feed me. I felt pathetic.”
He could see the pain he was causing. He could feel remorse afterward. And still, he would return to his room and continue using. Eventually, shame stopped being enough to change him.
Love became stronger.
His mother was getting older. And his children were getting older too. They did not fully understand why their father disappeared or why their parents were no longer together. But Rene knew the day was coming when they would start asking questions.
“They’re gonna find out that my dad’s a drug addict, and then they’re gonna be like, ‘Why didn’t my dad just stop doing drugs? Am I not good enough for my dad not to do drugs?’”
That possibility reached somewhere addiction had not completely destroyed. Rene did not want his children growing up believing his addiction had anything to do with their worth.
So he came to treatment.
This time, Rene found something different.
Time.
Community.
Accountability.
“Like most treatment facilities that only offer thirty days, you can’t really change your way of thinking… and break the cycle of fifteen years of using methamphetamine.”
At Beit T’Shuvah, recovery has given Rene months to do something he could never accomplish during brief periods of “dry time”: begin changing the way he lives, thinks, and relates to other people.
Most importantly, it has brought him back into relationship with his faith.
“Connecting with my God… and most of all, what I missed was people. I missed people a lot because I was so lonely.”
Now he has friends again.
He goes to Torah study and church. He works with a sponsor. He is working the steps. He has accountability and friendships built not around what someone can steal, sell, or provide, but around helping one another stay well.
He is discovering that connection can be something entirely different from what he learned at twelve years old. And he has begun turning that discovery outward.
Through a mind-and-body internship at Beit T’Shuvah, Rene helps residents exercise, hike, go to the beach, and reconnect with the world outside of addiction. He recently led his first group. The work combines two things that have always existed somewhere inside him: his love of people and his instinct to help.
For years, Rene knew how to survive. Now he is learning how to serve. And the difference matters.
The experiences he once viewed only as failures may someday become the very experiences that allow him to recognize another person who is disappearing into addiction. Rene knows what isolation feels like. He knows what shame feels like. He knows what it is like to disappoint people who continue loving you anyway. And he knows what it means to be given another chance.
For Rene, that chance is inseparable from God.
Near the end of the interview, he explains the principle he now wants to carry into his relationships and, eventually, into his work helping others.
“I try to find the best in people because God finds the best in me.”
Rene is still becoming the man he described at the beginning of the interview.
A kind man. A father his children can depend on. A son who can give his mother peace instead of fear. A person capable of helping someone else find their way out.
A man of God.
His past has not disappeared, and redemption does not require pretending that it did. Rene carries it with him now differently—not as proof that he is beyond saving, but as evidence of exactly how far a person can travel and still find a road home.
For fifteen years, addiction repeatedly pulled Rene away from his family, his faith, other people, and ultimately himself. Recovery is bringing those pieces back together.
This time, Rene is not simply trying to survive.
He is trying to become the man he believes God always knew he could be. A kind man.
